Dr. Simon J. Greenhill

I research why and how people created all the amazing languages around us,
and what they tell us about human prehistory.

I use (mainly) Bayesian phylogenetic methods to tackle these questions and have investigated
everything from how the Austronesian peoples settled the Pacific, to modelling the co-evolution
of linguistic structure. And I have built a number of large-scale databases to help answer these questions.

treemaker is a Python library to convert a text-based classification schema into a Newick file for use in phylogenetic and bioinformatic programs. Research in linguistics or cultural evolution often produces or uses tree taxonomies or classifications. However, these are usually not in a format readily available for use in programs that can understand and manipulate trees.

A growing number of studies seek to identify predictors of broad-scale patterns in human cultural diversity, but three sources of non-independence in human cultural variables can bias the results of cross-cultural studies. First, related cultures tend to have many traits in common, regardless of whether those traits are functionally linked. Second, societies in geographical proximity will share …

The Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications (CLICS), has established a computer-assisted framework for the interactive representation of cross-linguistic colexification patterns. In its current form, it has proven to be a useful tool for various kinds of investigation into cross-linguistic semantic associations, ranging from studies on semantic change, patterns of conceptualization, and …

With increasing amounts of digitally available data from all over the world, manual annotation of cognates in multilingual word lists becomes more and more time-consuming in historical linguistics. Using available software packages to pre-process the data prior to manual analysis can drastically speed up the process of cognate detection. Furthermore, it allows us to get a quick overview on data …

Where a newly-married couple lives, termed post marital residence, varies cross-culturally and changes over time. While many factors have been proposed as drivers of this change, among them general features of human societies like warfare, migration and gendered division of subsistence labour, little is known about whether changes in residence patterns exhibit global regularities. Here, we study …

Unlike a standard online experiment, a gaming app lets participants interact freely with a vast number of partners, as many times as they wish. The gain is not merely one of statistical power. Cultural evolutionists can use gaming apps to allow large numbers of participants to communicate synchronously; to build realistic transmission chains that avoid the losses of information that occurs in …